


Ihidaya

by YogurtTime



Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series)
Genre: Angst and Humor, Dark Comedy, Demon Shane Madej, Demonic Possession, Exorcism, Haunting, I swear it isn't vore, M/M, Pseudo Witchcraft, Sex, Sexual Possession, Sexual Tension, Some scary images, Syriac legends, a tiny element of body horror, pre biblical demonic lore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-30
Updated: 2018-05-22
Packaged: 2019-04-14 19:54:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 20,887
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14143344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/YogurtTime/pseuds/YogurtTime
Summary: Ryan gets it in his head to try a non traditional exorcism episode, but even with all the research involved, few translations or texts could prepare him for the machinations of a demon with a simple game in mind.





	1. First the Circle

**Author's Note:**

> Dedicated to my tumblr followers and mutuals in the Buzzfeed Unsolved fandom and special dedication to my little sister who, with a simple conversation on a snowy afternoon, inspired the entire premise of this thing 3 months ago.

 

 

 

“...So we’re gonna try an exorcism,” Ryan announced.

Shane’s reply came in the form of the wrinkle of a brow over a steaming mug of tea. “Didn’t we already do that...like a few times?” He was stretched out beside Ryan in their mini conference room; he did that in spaces he absolutely had no business doing so. He _could_ do that; would lounge about in audacious comfort in cafe booths, all limbs, sarcastic remarks and mocking smiles. It was really the only reason Ryan could think of as to why Shane had to get up all close to him over the table of papers stretched between them with his endless legs spilling into another chair as his right arm hung lazily over the back of Ryan’s chair.

“Not like this.”

Ryan had done the research. He was always researching. His work space, his home, and any available surface was a grand landscape of fluorescent page-savers and sticky-notes. This time was going to be different anyway. The exorcism was the least of it; it was the perspective.

“Perspective,” he told Shane. “I got the wrong perspective.”

“We gonna look at the demon from a panorama view or…”

Ryan barely registered this. He couldn’t find the draft of his treatment for the next episode and while he colour-coded, he’d gotten over excited when he laid all this out and Shane was touching things now, basically stealing all the air around them. Ryan inhaled like he’d forgotten to, got a whole lungful of Shane.

 _Shane_. Who always smelled like he’d just got out of a forest fire, singed and metallic; a little musky like he’d wandered into a Mumford and Sons recording session and they’d all harassed him with hugs and mugs of black coffee. Sometimes Ryan went home and his t-shirts smelled like Shane. It was stupid.

“Shut up and listen. I mean you know I’m not religious, but whatever higher power can command demons--”

He watched the words “command demons" drift past Shane psyche, watched Shane’s mouth form a sardonic line before a smile grew out of it. “All right,” Shane prompted affably, knowing Ryan was practically reading his mind and his doubts without his needing to voice them.

“-- _command demons_ can’t just be Catholic or even Biblical. I looked it up and exorcism is a cross-cultural thing.”

Shane lifted a stray page candidly between his forefinger and middle finger as if to peek at Ryan’s printing. “You’re gonna get fancy with this, Ry? Gonna break out the talismen?”

Ryan made to slap his hand away. “No spoilers,” he replied, trying to recall his train of thought. Shane withdrew to languidly rest his head on his curled fingers, elbow propped on Ryan’s chair just looking at him with a little smile on his face that Ryan couldn’t help thinking might be his favourite.

 

 

Ryan had been reading way too much about demons.

It had taken him weeks to get the photographs taken of the old Hebrew text, and then get them emailed to him by the Professor from Croatia in pdf format, a month to get it translated, and even longer to find the nearest location that would match the criteria. California wasn’t exactly a hotbed for ancient demonic practice, but his source material said one particular unused wine cellar at The Vista Vineyard was rife with demonic activity-- almost three accounts of inexplicably poisoned wine, broken bottles and one account of a fire- so here he was.

Ryan had had to go on ahead to cart all the supplies down the narrow steps. He was cold and already terrified, but he paced as he waited for Shane to get down to this grim little cellar.

Ghosts had been one thing, but reading about demons all the time was beginning to fuck him up a little more to be really honest. Last he checked, he didn’t used to have such a strange smattering of facts spilling out the corners of his thoughts in every silence he got. He’d be watching television and the brief mention of the brand name Red Devil had his subconscious reviewing demons in every antagonistic incarnation from tricksters to parasites. You got your Damnation, servitude, hunger, and worship; a histrionic mess of their origin stories looked like no one really __understood__ , but honestly, if a Nestle bottle of holy water hadn’t helped or a restless night with a disembodied entity who could switch a flashlight on or off hadn’t told him anything, maybe a whole transcribed text from the year 1743 could do him a favour.

According to the brand new tome that was his head, demons didn’t even have a country; a nationality or even, surprisingly a religion, but they did have favourite spots. Ryan pursed his lips down at old scorch marks and cracks in the flagstones, wondering if he might be paralleling something antiquated, but much more dangerous. This was probably a mistake.

It was probably going to be their best episode too though.

“You weren’t joking. I mean a vineyard? This _is_ looking pretty fancy.”

Clearly _Shane_ was joking. The walls were dust-covered, thick like you could taste it every time you breathed; even the thin boarded up windows seemed greased with dust and touch from centuries ago. Ryan waved his haphazardly stapled book of pages at him, squinting in the faint light of the camera. “Let’s get this over with.”

Shane seemed to draw in soundlessly, but his shoulders were shirked as if he felt a non existent draft. “I’m surprised you’re not your usual nervy self,” he remarked candidly. He had on a thick pair of clear glasses and his hair was a shock disaster on his head. “Where’s the crew?”

Ryan wished he’d put on another layer. “They can’t be here. The instructions say there can only be the--” He flipped the pages quickly to find the word he was looking for,”--the __Magic Worker__ because it involves this word I can’t pronounce- _-nephesh_ or something...”

Shane’s wondering, mocking tone was like the tartest bubblegum. “ _ _Magic__ Worker.”

“Shut up, Shane,” Ryan snapped reflexively. “Believe me, I’ve done the research. I’ve done so _much_ reading on this, I’m practically the wikipedia source. This exorcism is gonna blow your socks off.”

Shane’s smile spilled, slow like a crawling burn of ice. “All right, Bergara. I expect my socks to be fully non existent when this is done.”

“You shoulda brought an extra pair,” Ryan muttered back, unearthing a wrapped package of twenty candles. “Because your socks will be obliterated.”

Shane laughed at that, perching gingerly on an empty wine barrel, one leg folded over the other. “So if there can only be a... _Magic_...“ He spoke the word like any grown adult might say the word ‘cooties’. “...Worker, why am I here?”

Ryan had struggled with this, pored over the pages in his hand for a loophole that might not sound as silly as he knew it was going to be, but it couldn’t be helped. He felt the flush lick up his chest and burn his ears when he replied, “Because I want you here.”

He got one of Shane’s microexpressions. His eyebrows arched and his neat round mouth curved up. Definitely pleased, but his eyes drifted off toward the ceiling, carefully examining deeper scorch marks. “So what’s the story?” he asked the roof.

“Let’s get the camera on and we’ll get started.”

The camera was rolling. Ryan began the ritual as he recounted the story of the Vista Vineyard demon. It was a long one, with the preparation being nearly the half of it. He felt like he was shouldering an old coat when he began his memorised narrative, moving methodically as Shane watched in polite curiosity.

First it was the circle.

“That’s...not salt,” Shane said in noncommittal tones as Ryan walked around him in a firm diameter, pouring soil and ash from a bucket.

Ryan grinned. “Yep. Salt is wives’ tale or TV...er...urban legend nonsense. A mistake I made on Goatman’s bridge. Looked it up and salt is literally just for cleansing; nothing to do with binding anything. Anything could have walked in and out of the circle.”

Shane hummed a soft sound, could have been exasperation. That’s what Ryan heard anyway.

“Speaking of which, we’re not leaving any kind of gate open for it to pass through so don’t get any ideas,” he added albeit jokingly.

“The only idea I have is how much fun it’ll be watching you clean up your mess after all this.”

Ryan began placing one candle at a time between the top of the circle to the bottom in a neat ‘Z’ formation. “Sure. And then we’ll go out for drinks to celebrate our first __successful__ exorcism.”

Shane leaned forward on his perch, hands in his pockets. “Still got a perfectly good unopened bottle of bourbon…”

Ryan shook his lighter before flipping its switch. “Maybe it could be a thing…”

“... some expensive brand. Four Roses?”

“...wouldn’t be afraid of demons as much if I know how to get rid of them…”

“...it was a Christmas gift. So you should come over.”

Ryan lit the last candle, realising suddenly that Shane had dropped a casual invite to his apartment. Something he rarely if ever did. For all the times he’d been around Ryan’s place, or even Ryan’s __parents__ place, the man liked his space and Ryan had only crossed his threshold once and it had been only for a few moments when Shane had borrowed his copy of T _ _he Brothers Bloom__ and he’d come to collect. He couldn’t help his grin as he straightened, warm in a quiet moment awash with candlelight. “Yeah, I’ll come over.”

Shane was studying the brown tips of his boots carefully, his crooked mouth curled in a smug little grin of his own. Ryan realised the camera was still fixed on them, alone in this dungeon of a room and for a wild moment didn’t know why he instinctively felt exposed. This was nothing. Just two buddies planning a drink or two.

Ryan pocketed his lighter, glared at Shane’s bowed head and twisted to stand at the top of the wide circle. “Right. Let’s do this thing.”

Shane took a deep breath, getting properly to his feet. “All righty. Where do you want me?” he asked in unruffled tones.

Ryan was probably just not gonna look at Shane again because every time he thought about it, he wanted to gather his things, book a flight to Brazil, and maybe change his name. “Just get in the circle,” he ordered as lightly as he could manage, reaching back to his bag to grab the sheaf of paged instructions. He heard Shane’s slow footsteps behind him, wasn’t sure why he was walking so slow either when they only had so much SD card space on their camera. He wanted most of the footage to be a possible brilliant to life show of demonic activity and maybe, just maybe Shane to acknowledge it for what it would be.

Ryan, supplies in hand, knelt and didn’t even bother to check for what was Shane’s probably laughing look at this part of it. It was all so __The Mummy__ with the clay jar he pulled over filled with blackened oil. He placed the page beside him. “Don’t laugh, but I gotta draw this symbol between us…”

Ryan still didn’t look as Shane said nothing. Was he actually listening to Ryan today or was he so dumbfounded at how much he wanted to make fun of Ryan but couldn’t?

“The symbol according to the Professor in Croatia is actually a word in Syriac transcribed as ‘Ichidaya’ in Latin letters, which he said means ‘Only’ or ‘Alone’. I couldn’t find any links on google about it in relation to demons. My guess is it’s meant to isolate the demon in the circle...”

“You… guess?” was Shane’s reply and Ryan flickered a look up at him, towering over him like an angular shadow. He was frowning, which meant he was stewing along for an argument. Ryan looked back to his page, meaning to trace the word in exact detail. His two fingers were coated in oil and they dragged over the dirty floor, trailing a gleaming pattern in their wake and he felt the silence and the draft and the burn of Shane’s stare as he girded himself up with focus. He didn’t want to fuck this up.

“Where did you even get all this mess?” Shane said suddenly.

Ryan finished the symbol. It was pristine; he kind of wanted to take a picture. “I told you I did my research. You mind reaching for my phone. I think I want to get a selfie of this…”

“...I think I’ll just stay where I am, thanks.”

Ryan looked at him. Shane had his hands at his side, was simply looking at the symbol with disinterest, but there was something about the line of his frame. It was straight, but there was a lean to him, forward with his feet apart as if he meant to walk suddenly and briskly but was undecided about the effort. Ryan scoffed, getting up. Shane was always doing some kind of bit for no reason. As entertaining as the effect was, he didn’t want to know. He stepped out of the circle and grabbed his phone. The visual was great even without a filter. Shane standing in the dark over Ryan’s wide convergence of candles, the shadows beating against the walls as the drafty room breathed a steady flow of icy air over the tips of flame. Ryan centred Shane in the shot, liked how the warm burning light looked on his features; it was like his brown eyes were amber and filled with melted metal.

“Gotta admit, you look cool like this.”

Shane folded his arms in an uncharacteristic lack of response to Ryan’s jab; he looked away from the camera.

Ryan shrugged, took the photo and pocketed his phone. He got on his knees in front of his little oil on dirt artwork and flipped a few pages to the words on the page. Also in Syriac and he was sure the internet was going to crucify him over his pronunciation, but…

“I feel like this isn’t a good idea,” Shane finally mumbled within Ryan’s pause.

Ryan’s eyebrows flew up. “Don’t tell me you’re scared, Shane?”

Shane made an aimless gesture at the room. “Scared? Of what? Having over thirty candles lit in a room full of alcohol? Yeah, maybe I’m not a big fan of dying in a fire.”

“The barrels are at least a foot away. And we’re almost done.”

Shane fidgeted, but he was silent in response and Ryan began what he could only think was an incantation--honestly, not the best word since the very thought of incantations and symbols brought to mind how done Shane would be with this whole thing if he thought for even a second that Ryan had happened upon at least three different mentions of ‘witchcraft’ in the related descriptions of the Professor’s translations. Still, Ryan’s own determination to make this happen waylaid any consideration of how stupid this must look especially as the words he read off the page stuttered off his lips like nonsense. He knew it was a real language and he knew someone somewhere would understand them and even more so, he knew the demon in the room would hear it and know he was serious.

The candles flickered and Ryan’s eyes locked with Shane’s. Shane wasn’t looking at the candles though; he was staring at Ryan in a strange sort of wordless question. Ryan continued the words, blinking up as the shadows on the corners of the walls started to descend. Shane seemed far away suddenly in the separation of all the candles, and the wideness and emptiness of the room echoing Ryan’s uncertain repetition of the words he read. It was candlelight; had to be; the room was drafty.

Shane looked up as well, just as the fire on the candles seemed to actually breathe in the air around them and glow brighter than ever. Each light seemed to melt together into one line. Ryan dropped his page and his hands hit the floor on each side of the symbol.

“Ryan?” Shane said.

Didn’t sound like him. Nothing felt right all of a sudden; it was as if the demon in this vineyard had descended right into the room with them and even Shane had to be aware of it. Ryan gasped and felt suddenly like he couldn’t read the words on the page, like they were going transparent as the symbol on the floor wasn’t just gleaming from its own oily texture, but from the light. He was abruptly seized with the notion that it might catch fire and he was really truly scared now.

“Oh, fuck,” Ryan whimpered, aware of a strange tugging like something was trying to separate him from the circle. This was a mistake. It felt like the words he’d said had a taste in his mouth; thick and coppery. Blood.

This was __definitely__ a mistake.

“Ryan,” Shane said again, more insistently, and Ryan looked at him just as he saw the shadows surrounding the candles blanket like a pair of wide claws and fall over Shane’s features.

“Shane!” Ryan shouted.

Silent. Ryan was shaking. Shaking in the dark. The candles had gone out.

“Oh my god…” Ryan breathed, sitting up. He still felt like his limbs were filled with a bad tremor. “Holy balls, dude. What just...what just happened?”

No answer.

Ryan felt the panic climb his throat; his boots scuffed the circle as he got up; he felt the ash and dirt on his palms as he scrambled to his feet to reach for the actual LED lamp. He switched it on and looked over to where Shane should have been standing.

“Shane?!”

He was sitting there, cross-legged and looking vaguely annoyed. “What?”

Ryan could have kicked him. “Why didn’t you say anything? I thought something happened to you!”

Shane seemed busy dusting off his denim jacket and jeans as he climbed unsteadily to his feet. “Why would anything have happened to me?”

Ryan stared at him.

Shane kicked the remaining soil and ash in the already broken circle in a fitful gesture of irritation as he walked past it. He walked past Ryan and switched off the camera in an unspoken message of ‘This is over’. Ryan didn’t have words.

“You didn’t see any of that? ...You were on the floor just now--you didn’t…”

Shane was examining his hands, his fingers like they were dirty.

“Shane…,” Ryan began earnestly. “I saw the demon,”

“Uh huh, right, I’m...going home,” replied Shane, turning on his heel and making for the door.

Ryan, in disbelief, grabbed Shane’s arm as he passed--barely got a grab-- aversely aware that the contact didn’t feel right; it was as if he had reached out and touched a stranger. In the absence of something he wasn’t sure of, he was instinctively searching. Shane blinked down at him, looking as uncomfortable as Ryan felt but what was it? Ryan searched his gaze quickly, still brown, still the same exact face he pictured when he thought--really thought __Shane__.

 _ _How dumb__. Ryan sighed, a long one, hoping for relief in it. He watched helplessly as Shane politely extricated himself from Ryan’s hold. No meaning. No words for it.

“Yeah, bye,” Shane announced.

Ryan must have stood in the aftermath of the door closing behind Shane for a solid minute before he realised three things.

a) Shane had left him alone with the mess and the camera

b) He had inexplicably revoked his invite from earlier

and c) The thing missing when he was there in those last moments, staring right at him, was Shane’s scent. No forest fires; nothing metallic or musky. No coffee. Just nothing.

 

 

 

Ryan was in his own apartment parking lot when he texted Shane.

__Hey, everything OK?_ _

Ryan stared down at the tiny ‘sent’ command under his missive. He couldn’t stop running over the sequence of events of tonight, couldn’t stop the remaining touch of panic sitting firmly lodged in his throat. What happened was too vivid in his memory to be nothing; the fire, the shadows, the light, his own visceral reaction to all of it and most of all, Shane being so weird by the end of it.

The staff on standby had told him later that Shane had hopped in his car without a word like he’d forgotten something and drove off. Something had happened to Shane down there in the vineyard perhaps the same as it had happened to Ryan and he was just being typical Shane about it obviously.

On the spur of the thought, Ryan swiped open his camera roll. There it was; plain as day. The picture of Shane in the shadowy cellar. Ryan stared and stared at it, as he waited for Shane’s reply to come, but all he saw was the same old Shane, gaze downcast burning golden and troubled by something he never voiced.

And Shane’s reply never came.

 

 

 

Going into the office the next day was annoying. He was tired from the drive the night before and absolutely more irritated at the idea that he’d spent a lot of the morning checking his phone over and over to see if Shane had replied all while refusing to send him another. He was not gonna be the kind of person who sent a hundred chain messages just to get the guy ignoring him to reply. It wasn’t like Shane was his _boyfriend_ but wasn’t it common courtesy to reply to text message?

Ryan practically beelined for Shane’s desk notable against their coworkers’ desks with his mac littered with stickers of nebulas and an odd hipster brown Cheers logo, the pictures of weird landscapes pinned to the wall beside and most Shane of all, the sticky coffee mug forgotten from probably two days before. No Shane though.

Ryan’s heart sank. He turned and dropped his bag dejectedly on his desk as he sank in his chair and dropped his head back, looking at the ceiling with an annoyed sigh.

Shane didn’t come in that day. Ryan worked quietly, occasionally glancing at his phone, but eyes darting to look at Shane’s abandoned workspace right beside his.

At the strike of five, he pulled out his phone and typed quickly before he could change his mind.

_You better not be sick, you jerk._

He hit send quickly and stared at it, frowning at the two blue bubbles with just his messages and no reply. Finally, as a quick afterthought he typed even quicker and hit send.

_Just text me when you’re better, OK?_

Three isolated bubbles. Why was Shane ignoring him? Ryan practically tossed his phone back on the desk. How did he just not show up?

 

 

 

Ryan had a lot of little photos of Shane here and there, all scattered over his instagram and some in his media feed on Twitter. Seemed kinda weird that he kept flipping open that one photo of him in the cellar. Was it the gold in it; the burn of the candles and Shane’s features in brilliant relief, strangely irritable but a little beautiful in his distaste for it all. Ryan frowned and pressed his thumb over the space where Shane’s face was; he was spiraling, thinking of Shane too much. The black backdrop of the photo stared back at Ryan around the edges where the candlelight shone; Shane seemed hugged by it, by the shadow. Ryan pictured again the moment the candles burnt out, only seconds before when the shadows seemed to have hands--no, _claws_ , long fingered claws grasping a shape out of the dark.

What if something had actually happened to Shane down in that cellar? What if Ryan had summoned something and it had latched onto them?

Ryan shuddered, looking reflexively around the practically empty offices as if the answer would be breathed through the air around him. God, he needed to see Shane so he could tell Ryan he was being stupid.

 

 

 

Ryan had expected to feel relieved when he came in the next day and Shane was leaning against the counter in the breakroom, mixing what looked like oatmeal and hot water, but getting an eyeful of him for the first time in two days was more of a shock than anything he expected. L.A was definitely its usual warm in March but the sight of Shane in a pair of cargo shorts and a non descript t-shirt awoke a disquiet in Ryan. Even on its hottest days, Shane dressed like any midwestern suburban boy with his denim jacket, undershirt, button-up long-sleeved _shirt_ over Levis. Layers basically. He dressed like leaves were always dying around him, like hot pacific weather couldn’t warm him, like the cold was in his bones. The guy standing in front of Ryan looked like a Banana Republic ad, long legs folded over socks and canvas shoes; even had a sheen of sweat gleaming into the dip of his low collar-- a v-neck?! Ryan stared.

Shane looked over at him, bland as the colour of paper, offered a grim, charmless smile, then he looked back down at his oatmeal. Ryan couldn’t help it; he got mad.

“What’s the matter with you?”

Shane’s eyebrows went up, still looking fixedly at his plain old oatmeal, stirring diligently. “Good morning to you too.”

“Yeah yeah. Good morning. Why didn’t you answer any of my texts?”

Shane scratched his clean-shaven chin distractedly, and Ryan noted Shane’s mousy-brown hair looked _clipped_ , not styled in any usual Shane way, just really short and not its usual on-the-verge of disaster. Ryan didn’t know why but he _hated_ the sight of it.

“Haven’t looked at my phone…” Shane mumbled.

Ryan folded his arms, feeling the heart rate equivalent of a fire alarm going off. What the hell?

“...you know sometimes it’s good to switch off. Phones have taken over our lives, Ryan; It’s better to just talk to people face to face, you know; like the good old days--” Finally Shane smiled, a pale revelation of a row of teeth, eyes squinted up in two black crescents. Not joking; just complacent in an inspirational aftermath.

Ryan’s breath swept out of his lungs in a shallow, quaking fear. The very fact that Shane could deliver those lines without a single touch of irony had Ryan’s legs moving woodenly for the door. Ryan never thought he’d know evil when it was looking right at him, but just then, coming out of the soulless depths of Shane’s affable stare was the glaring absence of his friend, a vivid upside down image of a candle without fire.

It wasn’t the words. OK. OK, it was the words, but the tone too; the unassuming flatness of the statement like he fully and entirely felt that this was a refreshing take on modern day society, as if he hadn’t mocked those very same people with those very same words time and time again. Ryan didn’t know what made him feel so completely swept up in his own fear right then, but he knew the word sitting perched on his tongue, foreign in its namelessness and intangibility, but terrible all the same.

Demon.

A _real_ demon.


	2. And Then The Oil

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Armed with only confusion and some holy water, Ryan is a man with a mission. Unfortunately, late night visitors don't always knock.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just want to slip a quick thank you to the kudos and comment-leavers out here in the world. You guys don't know what it means to be a long time writer coming from a fandom that has no problem leaving 2 kudos per 90 hits with no comments. I really wanted to reply to the rest of you but I'm terrible about deconstruction, meta, and spoilers. Thank you all the same; you've made me so very happy.

 

 

 

Of course he couldn’t say anything to anyone.

It seemed bizarre that no one else had noticed. Half the morning passed with Ryan staring in horror at Shane go about a strange little routine. He sat at his computer, and Ryan caught himself squinting at the flurry of images crossing Shane’s screen from his desk, watched him get up and walk across the office without a word to anyone, stop at the water coolers, drink like four or five little cups of water, and then wander his way back to his desk in the strangest spurts of movement, legs seeming awkward. It was as if Shane--or no, the demon was sapping up every single source of the human experience, easily appearing normal to everyone else but operating in such vague inclinations of humanity.

Nah, this was dumb. How the heck could he even be sure this was a demon? Shane would laugh in his face over this entire train of thought, Ryan was sure, but the very thought of approaching this not-Shane again in any capacity seemed to draw every flag of danger. His skin was already crawling.

Panicked and feeling a little bit like he had to have lost it, Ryan grabbed his hard drive full of their as of yet unedited footage and found himself a secluded space upstairs in one of the sound editing studios.

The footage was clear as he’d hoped it would. The camera light didn’t extend to the far corners of the cellar, but as Ryan lit the candles one by one, talking to Shane comfortably the room seemed to beam around them. Ryan rested his head on his hands, watching Shane walk a perimeter around the circle while Ryan was distracted. He watched the pair of them, watched short sentences; Ryan felt his old shyness like a weird little ache. He absorbed their silly ringing shells of statements they made which seemed like nothing now as he watched Shane just _operate_.

It was a little innocuous to see in contrast to what he’d seen of Shane so far today. Ryan adjusted an earbud, feeling his chest gulp back a new nameless feeling.

“ _Just get in the circle_ ,” his video self ordered, head bowed over his pages. He watched Shane’s body language, watched his hesitation, the casual swagger of earlier all but vanished. Ryan watched the slow approach he hadn’t looked up to observe at the time, watched Shane’s hands clench.

“What were you feeling right then?” Ryan muttered at the screen wonderingly. It felt like comfort to talk to a Shane who wasn’t there, to not think of the monstrous being sitting at Shane’s desk then.

When the ritual began, Ryan didn’t watch himself; he kept focused on Shane. He listened to the video crackle a bit, sure of sounds and ghastly voices but not wanting to zero in; fear laced his lungs as he turned up the volume, listened over the sound of his own voice reciting foreign words. Shane made a single jerky movement as Ryan traced the pattern of the symbol on the floor; the strangest thing. It looked like a glitch almost. Ryan braced over the touchpad of his laptop and scrolled back. It was the same. Shane’s whole body leaning forward and his body twisting suddenly like he meant to walk away and then Ryan was really listening to himself.

“... _You mind reaching for my phone. I think I want to get a selfie of this_ …”

Shane’s hands were fists at his side, braced in a weird kind of motionless struggle. Ryan swallowed, wondering at his video self, wondering why he didn’t look up until Shane in his most skittish tone replied, “... _I think I’ll just stay where I am, thanks_.”

There was no denying it; Shane was… stuck and visibly trying not make it a thing. Shane was planted in the circle and Ryan hadn’t even noticed, but how? Was that when the demon had entered him? Had he set Shane up as a sacrifice to some nameless creature?

 

 

 

“What do you mean, _different_?” Quinta drawled absently, collecting her lunch from the fridge in the break room.

Ryan couldn’t stop pacing; he was holding his hands together in a tight clench, fingers curled. Mounting hysteria had no words for it, but he was about to lose it. He’d gotten Shane possessed!

“Tell me you see it too,” Ryan hissed. “I can’t be the only one--he’s not normal!”

Quinta shot him a laughing look. “Between the two of you, I don’t know where the word ‘normal’ comes into play. What is this?”

Without thinking, he put his hands on Quinta’s shoulders and guided her toward the canteen area and pointed across the scattered rows of tables and their coworkers milling in with their lunches. There Shane sat alone in a corner, dipping a spoon into a bowl of soup he’d poured meticulously from a thermos.

“Just watch,” Ryan whispered.

Quinta sighed, mouth forming a moue of exasperation.

Far off there, only lit by two stripes sunlight bleeding through the blinds which Shane had closed only on his side, Shane (or rather, the thing) stared off into the middle distance as he brought the full spoon up to his lips. The spoon touched his lips, but the contents spilled right back into the bowl like he had completely forgotten how eating worked.

“See that?”

Quinta burst out laughing. “Right, right. So he’s having trouble functioning--”

“He sat there for an hour this morning with his oatmeal doing the exact same thing!” Ryan snapped and several of their co-workers looked over. Quinta was still laughing and she patted Ryan’s arm as she shook her head, walking off.

Ryan didn’t bother trying to convince her to keep watching; he kept his eyes fixed on this Shane Impersonator, green pea soup rolling down its chin, gaze still drawn to some ever distant presence on the opposite wall. What sort of demonic imitation of humanity was that?

Then it hit him. Probably in the fury of his own shivering and the feverish cloud of his head. Was he coming down with something; was it panic-driven? Or was it that Shane hadn’t been the only one in the cellar interfered with?

He didn’t say anything to anyone; didn’t even bother to go back to his desk to collect his things. Ryan turned on his heel and walked out the main doors, treaded an even track across the parking lot in the now sweltering sun straight to his car.

 

 

 

He barely registered the drive home; the trip was some kind of non-event until he was unlocking the door of his apartment and tripping over the entryway, in a mechanical hurry until he was reaching for what he’d come home for.

His bedroom bookshelf; all his Unsolved paraphernalia, books and trinkets; some found items and little weird souvenirs like a dumb little voodoo doll that looked like him in its most bare minimum structure--black straw hair and a face--from New Orleans that Shane had bought and put in his luggage as a really sick joke. On the third shelf, they were sitting there, just as he’d left them months earlier.

Two one litre bottles of water.

When Ryan had told Shane he’d had two single litre bottles of water blessed by a local priest, Shane had guffawed before telling him in express tones how idiotic the notion was and that one day someone visiting Ryan would think it was just water--”Which it is,” he’d added-- before they’d drink Ryan’s precious holy water.

Ryan could even hear the laughter in Shane’s voice, like a stinging salve. “You know California is in a _drought_?!”

Ryan grabbed one of the bottles by its neck, aware in his cool air-conditioned room the damp of drying sweat on his temples and back of his neck. He shuddered as he made for his bathroom with the bottle. Like it was perfectly normal thing to do--in some far off space within his brain he was aware of its absurdity especially as his bare socks made contact with the veneer of his shower floor-- he unscrewed the cap of the water, lifted it with both hands above his head, and poured.

Even at room temperature, the burst of the water rushing down, plastering his hair to his head and spilling over and through his shirt was a shock. A wake-up call. Ryan gasped out as the water soaked him, aware suddenly that he had his phone in his pocket. He dropped the bottle on the shower floor and fished it out-- dry--and leaned out of the shower to place it delicately on his counter. He ran a palm down his wet face, blinking past the droplets still clinging to the tips of his hair.

“Um…” he mumbled tentatively to the room. “The power of Christ compels...me?”

He listened to the silence of his bathroom like it might laugh at him, feeling much more grounded and decidedly idiotic.

Ok. Maybe he wasn’t possessed. Unless this was some bodysnatchers shit where he couldn’t possibly know he was or wasn’t...Maybe this had all been something of an overreaction, but at least he knew.

Shane on the other hand…

 

 

 

He _knew_ it was a bad idea. Well, he only _truly_ knew the moment he was standing in a dry set of clothes in the entryway to one of the conference rooms, facing Shane, second bottle of holy water in hand. Shane was looking right at him, frozen on the spot, eyes widening as he took in the sight of whatever look Ryan probably had on his face at the time.

It was the panic in him, fight or flight--an untempered amalgamation of both seizing his nerves as he yelled at a mortifying pitch, brandishing the bottle at Shane, cap off. “ _Release_ him!” he barked.

“What are you--”

The water hit the whole front of the not-Shane’s shirt, splashing the table and the carpet near him as Shane recoiled and Ryan followed, shaking the bottle clear of each drop.

Silence. A few titters from some interns while a producer from another department sat there looking shocked.

“Ryan, what the... fuck?” Shane exclaimed off the tailend of a choked gasp.

He was sopping wet, water trailing down his chin, down his plastered wet v-neck, eyes bright with distress and disbelief. Ryan stared back at him, watching, waiting. He didn’t know what to expect. Smoke? Keanu Reeves from _Constantine_ to signal that everything was fine in his comforting monotone?

Nah. Instead what he got was:

“Is this supposed to be some kind of joke?” Shane snapped at Ryan’s quiet blinking stare.

Ryan dithered a bit, screwed the cap back on his bottle, thinking in some strange hysteric helplessness that he’d have to get two new bottles of this stuff now. “I…”

What was he doing? Everyone was staring. Shane was staring, dripping on the office carpet, only a moment away from withdrawing.

He hissed it in an undertone, suddenly overcome at the sight of his Shane, who knew him in all sorts of ways he had never voiced to other people, now looking at him like that. Ryan felt like the Shane-- his Shane would have known exactly why he’d done this in all its absurdity, but this Shane had a gaze fixed on Ryan like he was some _stranger_. “This is all wrong.... The cellar-- Shane, if you can hear me...this _creature--_ ” He couldn’t say the word ‘demon’ aloud. This whole thing was stupid. It all seemed so convincing just an hour earlier.

Shane’s mouth was a twisted line, sharp in something new--distaste?. “What are you talking about? Why are you so weird today?”

“It’s not me, it’s you,” he mumbled. “Look, I’m so so sorry…” and watched his words land, watched the demon, now gripping at the wettest part of his t-shirt, frown at him. “I’m sorry but you’re not him and I want…”

_I want him?_

The abrupt advance startled him, Shane’s body could cross a distance in a single stride and Ryan could only grip the neck of the bottle as a hand descended on his wrist, a hard but delicate grip, fingers spanning his forearm with ease. His fingers slid up Ryan’s wrist, rough and wet and cold;one thumb licking up the indent leading to his palm. It was one of those odd moments where in some recess of Ryan’s mind, he was aware of how dwarfed he felt under Shane’s touch. And how _exposed_.

He watched a faint blaze in Shane’s stare thrust on him; passing anger and distrust. Bright like anything Ryan had lost before. Ryan breathed it in, a floating scent like it had come from another room above-- filtering down through the pores of the ceiling to cascade in his lungs. Fire. Shane.

“Are you in there... Shane?” he whispered, practically mouthed the words to that dim flame, the amber in Shane’s stare from that night in the cellar; the curve of his mouth when he’d told Ryan to come over after.

He was startled out of the moment at the sudden spate of laughter that broke out. From Shane--no, whoever he was. That same eerie smile from the break room that morning. A shake of his head as the wet palm of his hand slipped away, as if an afterthought had stayed his hand; Ryan stared down at the now damp space where Shane’s hand had been as Shane turned to face the conference room.

“Pretty dumb prank,” Shane chortled, shaking out his shirt. “Hope you got it on camera…”

It was like a single thin pierce right through his chest, a pinpoint of pain; cold with the same clinical heartbreak of a butterfly pinned to a felt board.

 

 

 

Ryan was just spiraling again, had to be; making up images to comfort himself. He was sure he’d seen Shane for a millisecond when they made contact, a startling press of just fingers on skin and Ryan wondered with some vague disquiet why the usual bundle of nerves Shane put him in when they touched could be in anyway considered a comfort.

It was in these considerations that Ryan sat in his couch that night with the TV on, wrapped in a blanket, firmly trying not to replay the flagrant images of their exorcism, of Shane’s silences where there shouldn’t have been, and of Ryan’s own guilt making the thirst of his memory like ash.

If anything, it had to have been the play of images on his TV as he drifted off. Maybe the memory. Shane lit like a golden idol under a caress of candles, the blistering sensory overload of his fingers dragging a question up the vein of Ryan’s wrist, and of course days before the exorcism with Shane breathing his air, smiles like meandering roads and terrible promises. Ryan sighed and stretched in his sleep, felt the warm hug of his sofa and a smooth velvety wave of hot air lick up his chest.

It was all like a dream though. Ryan tried to open his eyes but he heard and felt it at the same time, smell of forest fires and blood.

_Ryan_.

There was an intimacy in clenching the wool of his throw blanket around his thighs, his whole body warm and feeling half in and out of a dream. Ryan hummed, a sad sort of wilful hope curling in his throat. Shane. Shane was talking to him. Saying a string of words like iron-hot impressions on his lips, his open mouth, tongue. Some kind of stolen gentle kiss.

_Ryan_.

“Huh…” he breathed groggily, squirming at the tickle of several scraping touches up his arms, his shoulders. It felt so real. Ryan rarely had any lucid dreams, but this was bizarrely like he was lying there, in the room, with a grainy image of something peering at him out of long fulgid beams, almost like distant city lamps, fires glowing in the cold winter.

His head dropped back in the void, his muscles relaxing at the solid caress of nails drew up his chest. He moaned hopefully, thinking of hot nights wrapped in blankets with a breathing body next to him. He thought of secret moments when nothing but the cold and the spirits mattered and the warmest thing in his rotation was Shane, hard grip of his hands touching carefully on the edges of flannel. Testing. Kind of special.

Shane used to smile at him in the dark when he’d close his camera, his eyelids drooping but his nerves only awake in his terror of something reaching in the dark and trepidation as his own hands wandered, hoped Shane’s smiles would last even as Ryan jostled him awake.

“You gonna sleep anytime soon?”

Ryan remembered that favourite moment of Shane in a cold, empty place, aware of dusty winds coming in on that abandoned asylum. Shane had propped his head on his hand, looked at Ryan all restless, and in one effortless motion had become the dark hand reaching in the dark, grabbing the edge of Ryan’s sleeping bag and dragging him closer.

“Just go to sleep now, for the love of all that’s holy....”

Ryan was sure he’d been sleeping but he was aware of the moisture on his cheeks, of the rock in the pit of his stomach gagging his windpipe from exhaling anything but sad, salty air. He was crying.

No. He was awake now. Biting back tears in the dark of his living room. It was his own damn fault too. “I’m so so sorry, Shane,” he said bitterly.

_“ **As you well should be.** ”_

Ryan’s eyes flew open. The TV was on, casting blinding fissures through his vision and he blinked at it, blinked at the late-night show host. Conan O Brien? The host was standing there, staring into the camera, all smiles and speaking affably, delivering a monologue. Ryan squinted. He’d misheard; had actually for a moment thought he’d heard a reply.

Seemed only appropriate to have his psychotic break now. He reached up to rub at his damp cheeks, scratching a bit at stubble as Conan went on about traffic stops or something.

“Fuck, I’m gonna lose it if I don’t fix this,” he breathed into his palm.

He might have missed it if he’d closed his eyes that second, but it was the strange sharp glitch of movement of Conan’s head turning on the television that made Ryan’s hand drop to his lap and his eyes widen.

_“ **So fix it, Ryan.** ”_

Nothing new about Conan O’Brien’s tone nor the delivery except that he had his arms crossed and was looking right at him, through the lens of the camera, through the screen right at Ryan. Conan O’Brien was talking to Ryan right through the television with a very familiar smile on his face.

_“ **Don’t just sit there. F** \--and somehow President Trump’s approval rating has gone up by forty-five percent-- **ix this**. **I know you can hear me, Ryan-** \- At this rate, he is two porn stars away from being reelected_.”

The audience laughter and applause rang around Ryan’s living room as Ryan’s mouth fell agape. He could feel his spine climbing the back of his sofa as he scrambled back, away from the television screen, away from Conan’s jovial diatribe, slurring away to make way for other words, words not his own. Talking to him!

“Oh my god, _oh my god_.”

“ _Facebook announced_ \-- _ **do I have to get basic with this? B-bbbbbbb--blood on the walls**_ \-- _major changes to its privacy settings_ \--” Conan glared mid-sentence, a strange misplaced expression in the middle of a joke that hadn’t landed. “-- _APPARENTLY THEY’RE GOING TO START HAVING SOME_.”

Ryan knew he was screaming but his TV’s volume had spiked, the little indicator on the top flooding up to a hundred in volume. Laughter, ringing and broad in the single room, burst out his speakers, an audience he couldn’t see responding to Conan’s super topical joke as if not hearing the shaky interruptions in his speech, as if not seeing the look on his face, vaguely annoyed and staring a still-vivid unholy gaze right at Ryan.

He was going to get evicted but it didn’t matter. He hit the floor behind his sofa, briefly aware that in his total and complete fright, he’d launched himself over the back of it. He wriggled upright, knees to the wood floor and fingers scraping a sweaty hold as he kept screaming, unaware of where he was trying to escape to but only knowing the moment his back hit his now closed and locked bathroom door.

The white vanity lights of his bathroom glared a stark awareness on Ryan. He was awake. This wasn’t a dream. He couldn’t stop breathing off the vague sprint he’d just committed to a second ago and stopped short. He was still muttering things, vague drops of ‘oh my god’ and ‘holy shit’. Seemed a distant sound against the sound of his TV out there.

He whimpered a tiny bit as he clambered unsteadily to his feet, grabbing at the counter. Then he saw it, on his right arm, red like a burn. Ryan dropped back to his knees, a voiceless sort of would-be scream perched on his tongue as he turned his forearm over to reveal not just the round rash but an extension of it over the veins now popping over his muscle flexed to tension--fingerprints. Red and angry. A handprint on his whole forearm like something had gripped him in a vice.

He’d never felt such a wild rush of horror in his life, nothing so concrete had touched him before despite how clear and unmistakable the glint of a flashlight in control of a demon could be. That was small potatoes compared to this. This was a whole other thing and he was probably gonna wet himself.

That notion stopped right there and then as all the moisture in the room seemed sucked right out in a sudden chill wind hissing from the walls and Ryan’s lights flickered just as the worst sight played across his vision. His medicine cabinet mirror shook on its hinges as its glassy surface burst with several blooms of red, drooling down the reflection and Ryan was sure he’d just hit his head on his shower door in a frightened jerky movement, already screaming again.

_**WILL THIS DO, RYAN**_? The red on his mirror spelled out in long thick droplets.

Amid the ringing in his head from the splinters of pain on his scalp, Ryan registered the words even as he swung himself up, socks sliding against the bathroom linoleum as he ripped the door handle back to get out of the room back into the living room where his TV had muted mysteriously.

“Wh-What do you want from me?!” he barked at the quiet of his living room, fundamentally aware that he was breaking a rule he’d sworn to. Never talk to the ghosts. Never talk to the...demons?

There was a commercial on the television, a family of three in a Volkswagen. They were laughing and smiling at each other. The camera panned over to the little girl sitting in her car seat, smile a-glow in the perfect weather outside the vehicle.

She waved. Frantically. Calling him to talk to her. Insistent.

Ryan’s t-shirt was soaked in sweat and his hands were shaking, but he grit his teeth. If this was how he was going out, via haunting? He was going to get answers and he was going to go out standing. He reached for his remote and hit the mute button, watched the screen flicker as the little girl smiled even wider, too wide. The car interior around her shook and went grey as her two parents in the foreground’s eye swivelled, looked right at Ryan as well.

Ryan thought of his _lola_ , thought of her old round fingers gripping her rosary on Sunday mornings, telling him the words in Tagalog he was meant to say. He couldn’t remember them. Couldn’t even think that they might work now. He was out of holy water and quite alone right now. Well, as alone as one could be in a room with an entity staring at him through the eyes of three people on his television. The serenity of knowing it was over made his trembling cease.

“What the hell do you _want_ ,” he said, boldly, fists balled and legs apart, and ready to bolt if need be.

The little blonde girl did a very odd thing then and pouted. She crossed her arms in an over-the -top gesture, eyes squinted. “How _rude_ ,” she said in a baby voice.

It reminded him of someone. Well, either one of the Olsen twins on _Full House_ for one, but something else. It was silly and dramatic. Very timely reference from the nineties, played out like only Ryan would get the crevices of pop culture he’d seen. It was a weird little sign of intellectual respect funneled through obscure call backs that Ryan knew very well...

“Sh-Shane?” Ryan whispered uncertainly, feeling foolish immediately.

The little girl dropped her pose and gave him finger guns. _Finger Guns_. “What up, baby?”

 

 


	3. Then The Blood

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ryan engages with the creature that visited him and learns just what sort of consequences his exorcism had on him, Shane and the disembodied monster whispering to him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This took way longer than I had even come close to anticipate. Honestly if I had known I might not have posted the first two chapters so soon but there were a lot of elements I wanted to execute in a very precise way which inspiration doesn't always allow for. The direction is still the same but I decided to go with a different execution which means another chapter of this is coming pretty quick. 
> 
> Thank you to everyone reading this. I didn't think my strange little story would get such great reception. I am truly and honestly grateful.

 

 

 

 

Ryan dropped back into the couch, like his knees had given out. The little girl blinked at him, head cocked like an odd bird before her gaze dropped and the commercial played out. Suddenly a nondescript fellow in jeans and a polo shirt was telling him to sign up for an online university. Ryan swallowed, waiting, watching the screen, thinking something especially odd about the whole situation.

“Shane.” He tried to speak clearly into the quiet buzz of the television background and his own unsteady breathing. “Shane, if this is you, then who was that at work today…?”

The man on the screen droned on, now in a graduation cap and robe, indicating a phone number on the screen and smiling brightly with accomplishment as his family hugged him.

Ryan could feel his own fingernails through the grip he had on his sofa upholstery. “Shane?!”

The screen blacked out and the next ad played. A man talking about body wash. Ryan drew back a little as a muscular man, under a flush of cinematically steamy hot water, twisted to face the camera, princely features fixed on Ryan. “ _ **Sorry. The vibe of that last one was too good-- maybe too pure-- couldn’t get through. Can you believe that? A long con like Devry University employing a sweetheart like that to speak for them**_...”

There was something about hearing Shane’s verbal tics come out of the man’s mouth that drained the situation of all its horror and simply had Ryan sinking properly into his couch cushions, staring at the spectacle for what it was. A spectacle. Shane or whatever this was--his essence? continued using his loofah to massage a soapy layer over a pair of wet pecs.

“A-and this guy?” Ryan gestured at all of that vaguely.

“ _ **This one’s a real piece of work**_ ,” Shane replied. “ _ **He holds his friends and family hostage talking about himself constantly**._ ”

Ryan couldn’t help it; a laugh stuttered out of him. It felt so real--so present. “What do you mean?”

 _“ **You know. The kind of guy that says things like ‘People don’t understand me’ but they literally spend every conversation with anyone they know, just waiting for any chance to talk about themselves. Just,**_ evil _, Ryan_.”

Ryan laughed again. This was nuts. He was having a full on conversation with Shane. _Shane_. In his television, looking out at him through a stranger’s gaze but the look on the guy’s face was so tangibly familiar; Ryan could easily be listening to his buddy riff off some rant on a comfortable evening in his apartment. Laying aside the fact that his arm was throbbing, and his shirt was sticking to him in places where sweat had cooled.

“Shane,” he said, carefully. He was aware of how saying it made his voice tight. “I missed you, man.”

The man in the shower with a very Shane expression on his face, eyes crinkled and burning, smiled at him. Ryan couldn’t unpack just what it was just then that made him feel so empty and happy all at once; missing someone wasn’t anything new; quiet good moments with Shane had been abundant in those last days before the exorcism so what was different aside from the firmly bizarre notion that Shane was now capable of speaking to him through morally questionable characters on television?

Honesty. Maybe. It struck him like a twisted, warm spike that this was probably the most true, genuine moment between them.

“ _But_ you’ve...got a whole lot of explaining to do, Shane,” Ryan finally said.

A pause. The man in the shower rested a palm on the shower wall; physics seemed to fail there as there was no sign of damp or movement of condensation. Shane’s possession of this person existed in a void that only Ryan could see.

“ _ **Let’s do it this way**_ ,” said Shane, his voice a crackling growl through Ryan’s TV speakers. “ _ **You ask me questions and I’ll answer in the best way I can**_.”

Ryan clasped his hands together; something solid and palpable he could have hold of in these surreal moments that seemed still too bizarre to be entirely real. “OK,” he whispered, thinking quickly. “OK.”

The muscular man in the shower rinsed off the remaining suds on his shoulder. Ryan couldn’t tell if that was Shane or just--god none of this made sense!

“OK,” he repeated, gulping against a dry throat. “So you’re not human?”

“ _ **No, I am not**_.”

Ryan felt the gourd of unease in his stomach tighten. “Then what are you?”

“ _ **That’s…**_ ” It wasn’t hesitation; expressions stopped filtering through the man in the shower’s face. The image had frozen and then moved right on; the commercial resumed and for a moment, Ryan was crestfallen, worried that Shane had dipped out on him again. That was at least until he felt a wide breath of warmth come over him, washed over the whole front of him and the burn on Ryan’s arm prickled, like blood veins coming back to life, suddenly rushing with too much. Ryan drew back, curling his knees in and gripping his throw pillows all over again.

“Is…” he hissed, terrified again. “Jesus, Shane, is that you?”

The light in the bathroom behind him flickered, glance of shadow standing in front of him. Ryan stopped breathing then, was certain for a chilling second he was looking into someone’s eyes, someone very much there in the room with him. Eyes like he’d seen in his dream from earlier, flushed with fire.

“This _is what I am.”_

He was aware of the shaky sound he made only because between the sensations bleeding past the deep hollows in his ears, he was aware that he was hearing Shane’s voice in his head and there was only silence surrounding him.

 _“I’m like an old smoke.”_ Only Shane could say that with every touch of irony available and seem to mean it at the same time.

“Old smoke?” Ryan echoed aloud, then thought: _Exactly how old?_

_“I’m older than you’d believe but I am as real as you are. You can reply aloud if it makes it easier, but I can hear you all the same.”_

Ryan’s palms had come up over his face, like he could shut out the rest of the room for now; he could feel the invasion of a presence like a massage in circles up his chest, a surrounding grip so subtle and so fond, it couldn’t be anyone but Shane.

“I’m... freaking out, Shane. I think I’m losing it. Maybe I just missed you so damn much that I’m making this up to keep myself together; like m-my subconscious is trying to keep you--”

_“Breathe, Ryan. It’s not as complicated as you’re making it. I’m here. I’m with you.”_

“Tell me what this is then. Tell me who you are; who that thing in your body is--is that even your body--”

 _“Ryan, Ryan, Ryan_.”

Shane crawled across his skin like the brush of leather and Ryan felt like all of him--whatever Shane was now-- slipped up his rib cage, _deep_ , under his skin painlessly. It was a soft, adulating touch in light trembles. Ryan froze, fists unclenching from atop his knees, lying flat palms, afraid to move under this different feeling, aware of how new it was to be touched by him without skin, without anything palpable to see.

He didn’t...hate it. It felt as natural as the steady breeze from his air conditioner. “How are you doing that?” he gasped, swimming in hot shudders.

“I’m trying... a hand at comfort. Do you want me to stop?”

“No.” He could hear his own tone, a kind of desolate lost sound. Nothing sounded worse than any evidence of Shane’s physical presence leaving him. “Just...it’s OK.”

This time it trickled up his shoulders, firm squeezes and Ryan tried not to overthink it when his body responded, a blush up his spine; hot. In his bones. “ _Ryan_ , _I have some bad news.”_

“But--”

_“The body--the vessel and I have been separate for too long and I don’t know what’s going to happen.”_

“Vessel...” Ryan echoed tonelessly. What an alarming word for it. Shane’s body. For some strange reason, the first thing to come to mind was Shane’s hands. Perhaps because in this dark, honest moment with this different Shane alighting vivid thoughts in his mind, it was like fingerprints itself, cloaking him in a narrative he wasn’t sure how to deconstruct. And it was like Shane--the body’s--hands wrapped around his wrist earlier that day. The feeling of it was like this.

_“Yeah…”_

In the honest light of day, before all of this, he had never really dared imagine it as anything than what it was, but there had been times when Shane would contentedly touch his back or shoulders, fingers pressing heat stripes along the dips and grooves of his bones, his skin. And it was always with a flippance so fierce that Ryan could barely catch himself from wishing for anything more. It made him wonder at the notion of loving just a body with nothing inside and Ryan shut his eyes again, shut off the thoughts…

Vessel. What a terrible word for it.

_“You see, it was nineteen-ninety three. A very young boy wandered off alone in Spring Valley and fell out of a tree. I was a dying ember without a vessel there in the leaves on the ground waiting for the next fire, the next flood to give me life again--it’s hard to explain. His death breathed a second chance right into my mouth; his youth and his future. I felt bad for the voices that yelled his name. Shane.”_

Ryan swallowed, thinking of the empty smile on “the vessel’s” face this morning and the way he had looked at Ryan so differently like he couldn’t be bothered with him, and that had hurt him so deeply. In that moment, it seemed a terrible thing that a craven, hungry part of Ryan spoke first. “So...the person I, the guy I.. _know_.” The confession he’d let die in his mouth before it could form made the words taste like salt. “The person I know is you, not him…”

It was sad.

_“The person you know?”_

“My exorcism separated you and him and he doesn’t _know_ me, doesn’t talk to me the same. Not like you are,” he mumbled absently, trying to sound calm but his palms were hot and he felt like when he squinted he could almost see a wavering outline of something. Something he probably wouldn’t have let touch him under any other circumstance. “I can’t even really see you and I feel closer to you than I ever have.” Something about confessing that felt a little naked coming out of his mouth. He was already flushed all over, but he felt his cheeks colour.

“ _Would you like to see?_ ”

All the hairs on Ryan’s head, his arms, and legs stood on end like an electric current was lining the edges of Shane’s tone in his head. He could hear the joviality in it; only Shane’s type of mocking excitement like he was looking forward to Ryan’s reaction, which he knew, would be satisfying to Shane. “No, I’d...rather not. The TV stunt almost made me wet myself, thanks.”

_“You sure?”_

Ryan scoffed. “Not now. When I’m ready…”

 _“OK. When you’re ready._ ”

He didn’t know it was possible to fall into companionable silence with a voice in his head, but it was almost like he could hear Shane sigh contemplatively. He could easily be perched on the couch beside him, sunk deep in Ryan’s cushions, dwarfing everything around him including Ryan, a smile in his eyes like a sunlit lake cabin in an early Autumn forest.

If he were there, Ryan might have considered reaching out, grabbing a clasp of loose sweater. Nothing more. Just to hold.

 _“Why did you do it, Ryan?”_ It was the first new tone in that heated voice, warming the inside of his ears, plaintive and wistful as Ryan felt about the two of them. Their friendship and their future on the precipice of never ever worded promises.

Ryan swallowed. “Why did I…”

_Separate us. Separate him and I. I and You. I’ve been angry. It feels strange to be angry again, in this form. Maybe it’s more human to be like this again than it was to look at you through his eyes. To trust you like I did._

There was heartbreak in the chill of the impression Shane was speaking at him and Ryan suffered through his next few breaths. What could it feel like to want someone so hopelessly in a moment when he didn’t understand a thing about them all while they accused him of something so foreign to him?

“I thought I was exorcising a _demon_ ,” he said, louder now. He felt like he was speaking to the ceiling.

_“Maybe you shouldn’t’ve exorcised so close to home, if you know what I mean...”_

Ryan’s mouth clamped shut. Stunned and awake to the reality that _this being_ now so cleaved to him in a quiet wordless kind of intimacy was the demon, not the man at the office today “N-no, not you. I didn’t mean for it to be _you_. Look, give me a break. _Obviously_ I didn’t know you were a demon!”

_“I have no way of knowing if you’re telling the truth. The word you traced in oil for me, to call me into the cold. Where did you get it?”_

“I told you. It was in my research. I was looking for a new way--a different angle.” In one scrambling, weakened motion he got to his feet and moved for his work bag. He felt like he was carrying weights in his limbs, but still he dug around through various copies of forms and miscellaneous waivers he hadn’t gotten the chance to organise. The thick sheef of pages was near the bottom. “What was the word? I remember it was like, something about singling out something--god--here it is, Shane. Uhh...”

Down in the second section, he’d highlighted it in the Professor’s scrawling text in the middle of the incantation meant to call the demon into the circle. He squinted at it in the dim light, tilting the page toward the bathroom light.

“Ichi...daya?”

_“I-hi-daya.”_

Shane said the word, as if reading it through his vision. Ryan shivered at the venom in it, at how the growl of Shane’s being stirred in his lower stomach like Shane was whispering there in him. The pages in his hand scrunched as Ryan’s fingers curled in a flinch. He wasn’t gonna get used to this.

_“Do you know what it means?”_

Ryan felt wretched. “You know that I don’t,” he whispered. “Do you know?”

_Of course I don’t know; that’s why I asked you._

Ryan lowered the booklet and looked around helplessly. “Well, aren’t we a pair?” he snapped a bit incredulously. “This is literally what I get for messing with this junk, a best friend who’s a demon and--” He smiled, aware that Shane might see it. “-- and nothing to show for it.”

“ _Well, we’ve got something to show at least, but you’re not gonna like it_.”

“Just tell me,” he sighed.

“ _Without my vessel, I disappear.”_

He barely felt the pages slip from his fingers. Panic, in a less diluted form, chose then to strike. He had been hearing Shane all along, was awash with regrets and the wider details of his current existence--a damn near fatal and twisted question on the outskirts of his mind saying words like, ‘what does it mean that he’s like this, that he’s been like this all along and you didn’t know.’---distracted by his own determination to stay distracted. Ryan registered the words.

“Disappear like…?” he said. “...Like gone forever? Or…?”

_“I can only be on this plane if someone carries me through it; Of course the Shane that’s there, he’ll go on, but the person I’ve cultivated him as already must seem foreign to him, perhaps frightening.”_

“Shane, what the fff--what are you saying to me right now?” He could hear it in his voice, shaking like rainwater on an unstable surface, ready to trickle down, down until he couldn’t swallow anymore ache. “Is this---are you _leaving_?”

Shane was rambling in his head, ignoring all of whatever was happening to Ryan right then _._ New as it was and even more terrifying than the words themselves. _“I’ve heard of vessels starting over, moving far away to figure themselves out. It wouldn’t be the end of the world; he’d live out a life. Just fine. Safe anyway.”_

Ryan felt that old strange pain again, precise and practically clinical, burst under his ribs. He was suddenly aware that he was actually standing alone in his living room-- all his research papers scattered at his feet--talking in the dark to someone about to leave him. It was real, for all that demons and spirits could reach through the white of time and blood and body and the permanence of death to scream, Shane _leaving him_ was real. Ryan breathed in thicker salt-driven gasps now.

“How do I undo it?” he demanded.

“ _Ryan_.” Shane sounded like steam. “ _Ryan, I know just as much about how this was done as you do_ , _but--_ ”

“There’s gotta be a way though.” He dropped to the floor, passed palms over the mess of pages on his floor, flipped a few over, already racking his brain for the familiarity of any words that sounded like a reverse of all this. He could already see himself grabbing the stubs of candles from the trash bag in his trunk, sealing himself in a circle and fixing it. “You said I could fix it, Shane; you literally said--”

Oh god. He was starting to hyperventilate.

“ _Hey, hey. Just--let’s both just take a moment. Sit here and talk. You’re shaking. I can feel it...vibrations in your breath. Ryan. Just be still here, in this moment. I’m here. I’m here with you right now. Here..._ ”

Ryan had crushed some of the pages in his fingers, but the acid of his fear was ebbing at least for now. It was bizarre. He closed his eyes and he could feel his chest constricting not with any panic now, but with the ever-increasing pressure of arms closing around his ribs; the way it felt when he’d been half-asleep on the couch, a tickling arc of thick nails--no-- _claws_ touching up his nape.

“ _Do you feel that_?”

Ryan leaned into it, shuddered as the scrape up his nape grew even more gentle, caressing down the back of his neck. “Yeah. I’ve been feeling it for a while...” He soaked in it, a real proper contact, his naked arms out of the sleeves of his t-shirt touched to what could only be more skin, hotter like the surface of an oven only moments after it’d been turned off. Solid and holistically full of blood, Ryan scrunched his eyes shut even further, afraid if he opened them all of it would disappear. That’s when he felt it, hotter than the fingers and claws and the arms, a hiss against his neck.

“ _If I could just_ …”

Ryan went very still, his skin prickling to electric life all of a sudden. “Oh my god. Shane?” He heard the whimper in his own tone, wondered at it like he was far away from it. Shane, the demon, was materialising on him, speaking in a hurried desperate tone against his throat, teeth and lips wet like he’d just licked them.

“.... _want to exist inside you. Just once. Please_.”

Ryan could hear his own breath in the silence, quiet new panting and a grunt of relief when his mouth opened in the dark, waiting, hoping and unsure. His nerves were screaming. Ryan felt it like a collapse inside himself, the dreams and the things he’d wanted of Shane for so long teetering on the edges of fond smiles, frantic pulls in the dark and just _closeness_.

He heard the growl and it made him start. The sound hadn’t been in his head, it was trembling all over his chest, raw and low-- an adoring purr. “Oh…” Ryan whispered, like he understood, but really, he didn’t understand it at all. Ryan got sex; got that it should be simpler; dire and basic like taste and need. This was deeper and as he raised his hands to feel around in his blindness, he touched across the length of fangs; the tip of his index finger pressed questioningly and Shane-- _his_ Shane hummed a hot breath, ancient kills in the cut of his teeth..

“ _...I wanted this, Ryan. So many times I almost let you breathe me right in, but I never thought you’d want it like I do_.”

And Ryan did breathe deep right then as he spoke, “Of course I want it. Want you. It’s crazy; you make me wish...I wish you were here--god, I don’t even know what I’m saying…” Somehow he’d never even let himself think about the bullets of want that zigzagged sharply through his middle every time Shane breathed in his space.

“ _I am here, Ryan. And I want you. Before this ends, I want...”_

Distractions, he’d called it in his head, but now with Shane on him in so many ways, a dark power so hungry for him it was like he was being sucked up, Ryan had nothing in him to feel embarrassed. The overwhelmingly thick scent of smouldering fires, earthy like the deliberate ‘living’ scent on his clothes and from his hair, but sharper; all around him.

It was actual magic. Ryan was clutching for desperation as he felt real arousal and didn’t feel any sense of withdrawal, only a welcoming press of contact from something, massaging him through his shorts. It was like he’d done this a thousand times in dreams, could picture Shane’s burning brown stare, drinking him in but this new form was a force of nature, a living mist licking every inch of him already. He felt like he was being pulled open with Shane breathing into his mouth like an engine, sucking in Ryan’s groans. Ryan dug his nails against crooked edges up a back decorated with parallel ridges.

“How can you just-- be everything I ever wanted?” he murmured over lips he could only just feel ghosting across his cheek, nuzzling furious heat as Ryan started to rock against him. “And just never tell me, you--” Words failed him as he heard a new growl, more terrifying and exciting than the last, shake right through his whole body. The creature--Shane--had him completely.

“ _Breathe, Ryan_ ,” Shane coaxed and Ryan could hear _him--_ his best friend, in moments very unlike this. Moments of terror and he’d be out of his mind with it, thinking he’d come so close to death and decay yet there was Shane, sweatered and serious, calling him back to earth. “ _Breathe for me_.”

As if he were about to take a plunge, Ryan sucked in a desperate inhale, hips crushed to something hard and holding him down. The breath lasted what felt like forever. He felt like he was swallowing a physical fever and his head fell back. His demon kissed him, licked a long numbing tongue into his mouth, hot and simmering, and Ryan heard a moan like it was coming from his own lungs but he couldn’t make a sound; rather he thought he might choke,

He felt his body wracked with shakes, terrible and wonderful battle for air and he dug his nails deeper into hard skin, aware of Shane so much and the taste of him in his mouth, aware of Shane scooping up behind his legs and gripping him tight until he was wrapped up, arms twisted over shoulders. He still couldn’t breathe and he could feel Shane licking down the inside of his throat, hot like Ryan was swallowing something scalding; the flinch was terrible but he was rocking his body against fingers, pushing himself crazy to the friction of Shane’s palm, wanting to get there so bad.

“ _I knew you could handle it,_ ” was the throbbing song sang in a space right under his solar plexus, played like a thought pattern on the tissue there. And it sat there; it echoed and Ryan was out of his mind. “ _I knew it was always you_ …”

The thought died when he exhaled. A long high cry shook out of his lungs and Shane was _in_ him, all over him. He felt him in his fingers and his toes, felt him licking up his veins rushing downward and Ryan started to sob. He fell back on his floor, held up suddenly by nothing at all, but Shane was still there in him, expanding a weight in his bloodstream, growling up his muscles and tasting every inch of him. He felt the strangeness of it like a peculiar sort of swelling in his muscles and skin, expecting pain wherever Shane spilled into.

His skin was seething with want and his hand strayed down the waistband of his shorts; he was erect, spilling blooms of precome down his cock. He flinched and moaned at his own touch, already being pushed over the edge by the thing crawling inside him. He pressed desperately through his fingers, thrusting hot and sticky in his shorts. Disbelief made him hotter and he writhed on the floor, knew he was calling Shane’s name, hopelessly wanting more.

“ _Just keep breathing, baby._ ”

Ryan grit his teeth, hissed out any breaths he could manage as tears fell past his temples as he arched his back. “What are you doing to me--oh jesus…” He felt something lick across a tender space behind his scrotum, right under him and that pushed him over the edge. He knew he was sobbing, but he couldn’t hear because his ears were ringing with something like a speaker feedback as he came. He couldn’t even touch himself anymore because whatever Shane was doing to him was too much. He simply lay back, trying to grab for absolutely anything as he convulsed, feeling so full and tight like he was going to peel right out of every inch of his skin that felt delicious.

“ _I wish you could see yourself_ ,” said Shane, warm; like a dropped kiss, like a sweet taste in a floating summer haze; he was in Ryan’s mouth and chest, thick as honey.

“Fuck...me,” he swore, chest sore and tight and head loose as he came down. He’d meant to tell Shane to shut up, but the murmur and taste of blood deep in his throat was sort of scary and he felt a little dizzy.

“ _I feel like I covered all the bases on that one. Unless you want it again_.”

Ryan curled up despite himself, feeling a full on ache burn up his thighs and thrum through a deeply embedded area in his pelvis right where he guessed might be his prostate because his dick twitched. “Fuck off,” he gasped off a soft raspy laugh. ”Something about this felt too close a brush with death, i-if you ask me.”

God he was never gonna get his lung capacity back. It almost hurt to breathe.

 _“I wouldn’t have done that if I thought you couldn’t take it all.”_ Shane rambling off in his head again. _“Thought about it for years.”_

Ryan was alarmed at the erotic chill that worked up his stomach at those words. Maybe just the thought of Shane wanting to be so deep in him for so long, he would have eschewed even a physical form and god, there had been something in having Shane everywhere at once. Ryan sighed, pushing himself up off the floor, wincing at the swoop of vertigo almost launching him back down.

_“Take it easy. I’d tell you you’ll get used to your center of gravity being off, but…”_

Ryan frowned, climbing unsteadily to his feet, needing to grab the back of his couch to stand upright. “Why do you keep...talking like that?”

“ _Like?”_

He cleared his throat, felt like maybe the numb burn in there might be permanent now. “Like...I don’t know--” It was complicated to word, even with Shane hovering on the lip print of his thoughts. “--like you’re about to go off and leave.”

“ _Ryan, were you not listening?”_

“I heard everything you said,” he sighed, perching against the sofa’s arm because his knees were giving out. “And if you think that after being the one responsible for making you like this, after what you said about me-- what you said to me about the two of us, that i would just let you leave me?” His voice faltered; he couldn’t help it. Four days without Shane, without hearing him had been bad enough when he wasn’t so wrecked over the idea of him. Now, would be agony.

“I came to you hoping we might fix it, to convince you to do something terrible. It’s different now.”

“Something terrible, huh?” Ryan’s mouth was dry. He tested the give of his legs, found them to be sturdy enough for a walk to the kitchen for water.

_“Something we could do together to reverse it all, but yeah, it really is terrible.”_

The sound of his tap running was so banal, it jogged him momentarily alive, or awake. Whatever it was that boosted a glaring fixation on reality while his mind processed the notion that his best friend had come into him like a smoke and had had him a shaking, debauched mess on his living room floor. “Isn’t that what demons do? Convince us to do terrible things?” he asked, gingerly tipping a mouthful of icy water past his lips.

_“As usual, Ryan; you’re a victim of half-facts and fairytales.”_

The water burned going down his throat, like frostbite. He really was infused with some sort of fever; that or Shane had a constant breathing burn now settled in his lungs like a symptom of a delicious disease. Ryan swallowed deep, ignoring Shane’s jibe. “Then what’s your M.O.?”

_“That’s like me asking you, as a human, what your M.O. is.”_

Ryan thought about this, looked out his small kitchen window at the empty lot of his apartment building, dipped in caramel yellow streetlights. If he turned his head just right, he could see his own face in the glare of the living room TV light. “Wow,” he scoffed. “How the fuck do I get to be right about everything to do with the supernatural and yet so wrong just because you’ve been lying to me?”

_“I think we’re getting off-track.”_

“No shit!” he snapped, feeling a distant sort of hysteria mounting along the edges of their union. “So, what, you’re just going to go? Disappear off this plane or whatever?” His voice sounded tinny and sharp in the space of his kitchen, arguing alone to the reflection of his own eyes in the window.

“ _You’re missing the point, Ryan. Being with you tonight meant everything; to be able to have this first, honest, true moment together was something I didn’t think would ever happen. I’d thought about telling you so many times; I used to picture doing it but we got too far into this thing and I liked you--sometimes I hated you for it all--but gosh, I really liked you. That exorcism changed me too, you know? I’m confused and thinking all kinds of selfish things about you and here you are telling me to just convince you to do something terrible. As if…_ ”

Ryan placed his glass in his sink, stared down at the drain. “As if what?”

_“As if it didn’t hurt how much I love you, love being cleaved to you, tasting your blood, feeling every quiver of your insides and having your fear--your gorgeous, untamable fear that at the first sign of a challenge, you bite down on as if isn’t paralyzing you or pulling at the threadbare strings of your sanity. As if I could decide out of my own fear, weary and old as it is, of vanishing...just to make you take the vessel back, take his life all over again.”_

Ryan released his hold on the edge of the sink, reached up and ran palms over his face to his own hair, pushed its messiness back. _Love_. Shane had said that. His Shane; the guy who could hardly take himself seriously had really just said in hopeless terms of earnest that he’d come to love Ryan. It spoke to every suffering affection he felt about Shane, the overarching pain he kept hating when he thought of Shane leaving him. He’d probably go crazy...

“Take whose life? Your--I mean, the body’s?”

_“He has a chance to move on as what lingers of me in him fades. I brought him back to life, felt almost for a hot minute like he owed me, but I was being stupid. Everything he has now I acquired for myself. Ryan, I can’t make you do this.”_

Ryan was trembling a little. “What would I have to do?” He asked it firmly and felt Shane’s hesitation instantly.

_“Steal his breath and fill his lungs with...with ours.”_

_Ours_. Ryan thought and hugged himself, meant to cross his arms but wound up in a strange little embrace, squeezing out a shaky exhale, thinking of it with something like awe. “Do I...choke him?” The notion was frightening; he’d need to get him alone, make him feel safe and then…

“ _You could._ ” Softly. A non committal engagement. Shane didn’t sound on board at all. _“You’re stronger than him when I’m not in his blood.”_

“I could,” he replied. Was it murder? If he wasn’t killing him, just stoppering him down and filling him with something he’d lived with for over two decades. Ryan thought of the fever in his lungs right now and the word _disease_ occurred to him frankly and he was swept over, terrified but still thinking. I can do this. I can. For Shane.

For himself.


	4. Finally the Union

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ryan knows what he must do to fix everything, but there's a stark difference between planning to possess someone and actually doing it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Four months later and finally finished. I just want to send one more thank you to everyone who read and took the time to come by and tell me they liked this. It really spurred me on during the more trying moments of writing this. I really hope you enjoy the ending.

 

 

 

 

 

On the subject of Shane, his existence as a demon, and what it would mean if Ryan let him disappear, Shane didn’t bring it up. Ryan felt that was strange considering how close they’d been, were.

Shane had said he loved him and Ryan didn’t know what to do about that except worry about what he himself wanted so deeply from this new version of Shane. He felt so desolate and scared at the idea that Shane might go away forever, that the vessel might follow suit. Worse still, he was afraid that the sensory memory of Shane blurring right into his veins had changed him so much he couldn’t picture an intimacy that deep with anyone else.

He took a scaldingly hot shower--for whatever reason, the touch of any sort of cold on him burned deeper than any heat could, which said quite a lot about Shane and his layers. That alone was a whole other line of questioning

And boy, was he _full_ of questions, but he was also sort of grateful that Shane had fallen silent and drawn away, letting Ryan stew quietly as he moved on through his more human motions, tidying up the mess his demonic encounter had left him and doing other banal things like getting ready for work tomorrow.

Just seemed appropriate.

It wasn’t until he slipped under the covers of his bed and rested his head on his pillow that he felt Shane draw near again, like a familiar buzz of white noise in the silence. Ryan closed his eyes and inhaled contemplatively, smelled Shane so deep and soaked in the air. “How do I do it?” he whispered. “How do I put you in the vessel?”

He felt Shane’s sigh, layered and tired and he felt like if he were present in the room, he might have buried himself in Ryan’s hair, shutting off all the complications of this, turning Ryan to slow and dysfunctional jelly. “ _You’ll have to do it the way I’ve done to you, carry me in your mouth and breathe me out_.”

“Will you be there? Where I can feel you, I mean?”

 _“ I wasted so much time trying to re-enter him, to make like nothing had changed, keep the same old secrets. It’s my fault but I’m just not strong enough to stay like this, where you can feel me. Ryan, I should have come straight to you._ ”

“You tried to--”

“My last attempt was-- it was you, with your damned holy water. It dropped his guard in those moments and I practically barged in but something went wrong; too much time passed. We fought and he doesn’t even know it and he won, tossing me out right in front of you.”

Ryan pictured that moment again, now filled with the colour of Shane’s words; the vessel looking terrified at the splash of water on him, at Ryan’s shout of ‘Release him!” and that strange, ineffable look of recognition stark behind the glare of those round glasses.

Under the covers, Ryan touched a ginger line where the vessel had grabbed his forearm. He still couldn’t stop thinking about it, how it felt and the flow of fire fragrance hissing into the air when he’d done it. Then the appearance of the burn just as Shane began appearing to him. Had that been _his_ Shane, clawing his way into the vessel for one desperate moment, grabbing for Ryan as his one tether to familiar.

God, he was really getting melodramatic.

“ _Having second thoughts_?” The jarring impression of Shane in his mind broke into his thoughts.

Ryan pulled his sheets up, curled his fist under his cheek as he turned over; drew his knees up to his chest because now everything was giving him a chill. “Tell me the risks, tell me what could go wrong.”

 _“We’ll have one chance, Ryan. He has to be in the same state as when I first took him. Any notion he might get of what we’re doing will throw up his guards, his soul will force me out again and unless you’re able to swallow me back again right in that second, I’ll be lost._ ”

“I’m gonna do it,” Ryan announced thoughtfully as he felt his eyes grow heavy, a watercolour blur of dream images starting up; strange physics and alarming intuitives rifling through a jukebox album of memories. “It feels so selfish, Shane; I don’t want to lose you.”

Shane melted over him, cascaded over the separation of Ryan and his bedclothes, wrapped hot and perfect on him. “ _You know_ ,” he told Ryan, could have been saying it aloud because the words were vibrant in Ryan’s thoughts, tempered and calm like a long dream. “ _You’re the only human just wicked enough to make me stay_.”

When he woke up, Shane was gone. The morning air was thick in his room, sheer dawn sunlight poured through the window he’d left ajar the night before and his head was throbbing.

Between swallowing the flavourless egg on toast and watching the middle distance of his kitchen as he sipped coffee that only served a second dose of anxiety to go with the bright worry already singeing his nerves, Ryan was distantly aware that he was going to have a tough time acting normal at work.

Not that he’d been the most ideal appearance of normality the past few days, but the reality of it kept hitting him. _I’m going to work to find Shane’s vessel, lure him somewhere alone, and…_

If he could say it simply then maybe it’d make him a monster.

He pulled into the parkade at seven-twenty-five that morning, wearing the only sweater he owned over a polo shirt, craving even more layers if he could manage it. It was indecently early and he would be unable to stand a moment longer of silence in his apartment, thinking it through and possibly talking himself out of it.

It was there. The thought of it, sad and defeated--doing nothing, feeling his own body go cold without Shane ever again. No one would ever know. No one would have any idea how much that’d make Ryan want to die.

He sat at his desk, the now perfectly wrinkled pages of his original research laid out in front of him. Nuances of the exorcism, now branded with new knowledge. He’d jotted some notes in the margin weeks ago; things like ‘need to get a bunch of candles’, or ‘practice drawing the symbol so you don’t look stupid trying to trace it on camera.’

The characters looked so neatly drawn on the back of the page where Ryan had initially traced them for reference. _**Ihidaya**_. It was different because at the time he hadn’t even realised how central the word for it all was. The script had seemed like some sort of far away magic, a shot in the dark, but Ryan could probably still make the word.

Sighing, Ryan signed into his mac, pulling up his browser to quickly google the word. The results honestly should have been clearer, but there was an annoying supposition and lack of context to go with words in different languages.

“ _Didn’t expect you’d be at the office so early.”_

Ryan, head in his hands, waited for the heat to coil in his ears and for the presence of Shane to blanket him but he still felt cold. He sat up, aware in a terrible moment of elation and sickening clarity that Shane _was_ speaking to him or rather, the _vessel_ was.

He looked up at a familiar bemused smile under two arched brows; the fact that all along when the Shane from last night had been whispering to him, coaxing him through that intimate moment last night, he’d heard this voice, _this_ one when he listened closely for whispers in the dark.

For some reason he thought of Shane just a week ago. Physical, whole Shane. All of him; whatever he was, demon or spirit or just a being he was slowly finding himself suffering in love for, was _also_ standing over him, waiting politely for a reply.

“Shane…”

“You… really look terrible.”

Ryan just stared at him, couldn’t govern a reply.

“I… brought ya coffee…”

Ryan’s gaze dropped to the proffered hand. He was indeed holding out a steaming cup of coffee.

“What?”

He grimaced at Ryan. “Coffee. I stopped in at that one place, thought I’d grab you one. I...struggled a bit remembering how you take it, it’s…” He stopped short, resting his weight on his other leg, still awkwardly holding out the cup. “It’s got sugar in it; I feel like you maybe take sugar?”

Ryan swallowed. Shane of a week ago had bought coffee for the both of them countless times, knew that Ryan always took an americano with all cream no sugar, would have brought _iced_ coffee even. And there he stood, a hot coffee cup in his hand with an unspecified amount of sugar in it.

“Right,” said the vessel, eyes downcast as he set the steaming paper cup on a bare space between their desks. “I guess this has gotta be pretty transparent to you...”

He dropped his bag on the floor and pulled out his desk chair, wheeling it a little awkwardly forward, coming around it to perch neatly on the edge. Ryan was already pressed back against his corner of the table and was immediately affronted by Shane’s familiar knees brushing his own, practically caging his as he leaned a slight ways toward Ryan, an almost alien adaptation at accidental human intimacy. “Wh-what?” Ryan began, stopping short, feeling far too aware of the downturn of Shane’s body’s mouth, of the faint lines of distress around his eyes.

“The coffee is a peace offering. For these past few days.”

Something small and terrified in Ryan recoiled at the undertone of the words, of the way Ryan had the cadence of his voice memorised. This could be any day; the two of them talking quietly before the rest of the office filled the whole bullpen with a mass of chatter, clicking of keyboards and muffled laughter. The only dry particle stirred in the way he looked at Ryan, missing something like a layer of paint scraped off.

“Things have been getting increasingly strange; so many different feelings about myself…”

 _I have to look him in the eye when I kill him_ , Ryan was thinking. _And what if he’s never going to understand that I have to do it, need to_...

“...about you.”

Ryan’s palms felt dry when he curled his fingers in over his lap, felt like the lines in them were cracking. He was so cold. “We don’t have to talk about it.” He could hear the panic in his own voice, airy and tinny but shaking.

Shane’s body clasped its own hands together between his knees, head bowed for an anguished second. “We _need_ to, Ryan.”

“OK, but you see, I don’t _want_ to.” He had no voice for that; it came out breathy, panicked. The worst possible thing that could happen now is if somehow he forgot what he wanted, that some moral compass would push him to forget why he wanted it.

“ _Ryan_. I’m handing in my resignation today.”

Sometimes Ryan went out with old college friends and they’d hit their local court just a block away from his parents house. They’d go hard, running and sweating in the furious sun with the beat of a basketball and sneakers on sizzling pavement. Sweat, exhaustion and a little bit of clumsiness would make Ryan miss a step, plough into someone else and as he stumbled, he’d see the ground come swinging upward and he’d know before it really registered that he’d fallen, that he was about to feel a grand landscape of pain.

“Ryan?”

A long-fingered hand, untenably warm and solid laid a tentative touch on his thigh. Ryan shot to his feet, his chair rattling back. It might as well be a zombie reaching for him, soulless and hungry. He looked around quickly, sweeping a gaze away from this new Shane’s nonplussed expression. A few people had gathered in the breakroom door, talking softly, groggily-- playing routine. A photocopier upstairs was already going off, grinding mechanical murmurs in their silence.

“We can’t talk here. We gotta…” He twisted like a robot to gather up his macbook and his papers as if he’d need them. “Let’s go somewhere private. One of the sound booths…”

He didn’t wait for the body to assent; he simply squirmed his way to freedom and made a quick break for it.until he was vaguely aware that he was practically speed walking down the long hall past the warehouse entrances and the sets towards the little alcove near the conference rooms where the small recording booths stood. It was still pretty early so none of them were booked as of yet; Ryan picked the one furthest from the hall entrance.

Shane came in after him without any pause in his pace; he looked as distracted as Ryan felt he must look as his long arm closed the door around Ryan who twisted into the narrow dimly lit room and spilled his things on the tiny table under the mic. They’d crammed together in these tiny rooms so many times before; it almost felt like he was welcoming routine except that when he turned and looked at Shane, a statue leaning against the door like he’d fled from something and locked it outside their little enclosure; Neither one of them moved to reach for the overhead lamp. Ryan was terrified all over again.

“Is it OK if I go first?” Shane queried, arms hanging down almost out of place at his sides as his fingers drummed the side of his thigh, a ready and waiting question for motion, of intent.

Ryan had been in fights before. School stuff. How was he going to get an upperhand without outright attacking him. He felt like an absolute predator. “If it’s more about you planning to leave then probably not,” he mumbled. “I don’t wanna hear it.”

A sigh. Ryan watched the fingers that belonged to Shane move up, streamline several quick and exasperated tunnels through caramel brown hair that was starting to get long on the sides. He watched a mouth that belonged to Shane twist crookedly into a pained kind of smile. Ryan searched the eyes, and how they looked down on him, pliant and reaching in their wide, sleepless tunnels. What the heck was he looking for exactly? A reason not to do this?

“Well, you’re gonna hear it anyway. I’ve never felt this weak, my head’s a mess, I keep forgetting things and you...what do you even think of me before the exorcism?”

Ryan froze. “What?”

Shane breathed out a quick rush of air, expelling something rushed and uncomfortable as he took a single step toward Ryan who felt his spine crawl back against the table. “Who was I to you?”

He’d crumbled. Resolve was finite that way. He had to quit lying to himself; Ryan was looking at someone. _Someone_. Maybe not the Shane he knew, not the one he could still taste in a febrile still safe part in his lungs, but a Being. It was so apparent in the living entreaty of the words, fear and frustration in one, wanting and perhaps asking for everything in Ryan’s chest all at once.

Ryan looked around, felt useless doing it; aware that even if some part of his Shane was in the room, he wouldn’t know; wouldn’t be strong enough to argue his case right then. “Do you…” he began softly, heard the croak of his own voice, cleared it and began again. “Do you remember that week you were back home in Chicago and I face-timed you?”

He watched that brow furrow, careful concentration like a man treading water, watched him shut those eyes and fall back against the door, hunting, hunting for the moment probably taken from him in the exorcism because that memory was Ryan and Shane’s alone, that night was a shift in their relationship Ryan had noted and at the very least hoped in secret that Shane had cherished it like he did. He thought of the Shane who’d sat in a conference room with him only a week or so ago, resting his legs where they shouldn’t have been, leaning into Ryan’s spaces, smiling deep like they’d shared a secret made of hopes and almosts.

His heart sank when the man in front of him slouched, defeated as he opened his eyes, stare languishing in their mutual loss. “I don’t remember. I can’t remember; I’m _sorry_.”

“Don’t be,” Ryan said, swallowing a thick empty feeling, stones in his stomach. “It’s not your fault; god, it’s not even your fault.”

Shane shook his head, slowly at first then faster like he was shaking something free, angry at himself. “I had so much control-- I thought I knew what was going on, but I don’t feel like myself, then I come back to work and you’re just…”

Ryan couldn’t do it. He wasn’t going to. He couldn’t believe he thought he could.

“Maybe if you tell me,” Shane said at last, just outright helpless. “Just start it, maybe I’ll remember. At least I can try.”

“You’d gone away,” Ryan replied, a distant part of him watching as Shane drew closer, coming to lean just so against the table, resting a palm flat, dependent, on the surface beside Ryan. He looked feverish, like the effort at reconciling their past was giving him the chills. “You went away for a week. It was the first monday I was back at work without you, and I had had to do a ‘Q&A‘ without you. I just--I didn’t think anything about it. That night I called you.”

There was added colour there; he and Shane hadn’t talked about that night since. It was a strange perpetrator to Ryan’s feelings from the start, the things that Shane could do to him that Ryan had skillfully ignored for a year and a half afterward.

_Shane, a smile in the crinkle of his eyes at the time, lit only by a bedside lamp had answered with his phone way too close to his face. An absolute perfect view up his nostrils. “Hullo!”_

_“You sure got a lotta nose hairs. Maybe you shouldn’t be flaunting that around; some people’ll get jealous.”_

_The phone was lifted, a clear and fond shot of a pair of brown eyes. “I like to display the wares. So what’s cookin, good-lookin’?”_

_Ryan snorted. “You’re so weird. How’s Schaumburg? Your little village,”_

_“Still standing, the village idiot was especially happy to see me; said I should send his regards; you two should catch up.”_

_Ryan laughed the kind of laugh Shane always dragged out of him, head thrown back, goofy and incredulous. “Be serious, you dick. I’m nice enough to call you, check up on you and you treat me like this.”_

_Shane’s eyes were so so soft that night. His smile turning his gaze up in a special squint for Ryan, happy and fond. “Nah, I’m glad you called. I always feel like I’ve left the country altogether when I leave Cali, but you’re really just a phonecall away,” he said, before adding,. “...you and work.”_

_Ryan remembers reflexively hitting the volume button on the side of his phone, wanting to hear the subtle cadences of Shane’s voice after that statement, feeling a weird little plaintive loneliness trying to sap up the dregs of the ‘I miss you’ hiding in Shane’s words._

_“Maybe I should’ve had you on a live feed today; had you answer questions with me instead of Steven. He doesn’t really appreciate the severity of our work.”_

_Shane had chuckled at that, eyes drawing away from the camera like he had a thought, a private joke he only liked to look at and Ryan had felt their distance. It made him say._

 

_“Really, it’s scary to think what the show would be like without you.”_

_Shane looked at him again, squinting a reading value up the screen. Ryan felt the flush crawl up his neck and he swallowed, laughing quickly._

_“I’d probably go crazy finding all the evidence I do without you there to shut me down all the time.”_

_It was flat, but Shane was smiling again. “You’d go all Jim Carrey in The Number 23, apartment full of sticky notes and pages from old diaries by ghosts that are probably all you.”_

_“Nah, that’ll be you when I finally get that proof and you’ll have to bend over backwards trying to prove me wrong. Maybe that’s what terrifies you.”_

_They were joking; spiking quick jabs at each other and it felt like a good rhythm, familiar like kicking off a pair of sneakers you’d worn all day, ready to dive into the warm and free routines of home; the lack of pressure was alarming to him at the time because Shane’s smile was strange when he said._

_“That’s not even what terrifies me.”_

_He was thinking about maybe decorating Ghoul HQ with sticky notes and pages for when Shane got back; something to get a laugh out of him. Seemed like a lot of work for a one-time bit, but he was kind of stupidly obsessed with the feeling he got from making Shane laugh. “Oh, it isn’t, huh?”_

_“There’s the heroin thing of course, but that has more to do with losing a sense of self. I’m afraid of walking around, talking to friends and family and people--of seeing how they see me and knowing it isn’t the same as how I feel.”_

_Ryan was taken aback. They’d now and then funneled surprising honesty at each other when chance forgave them, but these seconds, only minutes into a FaceTime call it was like the distance itself had freed them. “How do you think I see you?”_

_Shane’s eyes had dropped, pale lashes looked deep chestnut against the pallor of his eyelids. He seemed to be thinking and Ryan, gripping his phone above him, turned on his side, watched Shane’s pupils bloom when they made eye contact. “I think you see me the most.”_

Had it been the incorporeal creature living in the body that had looked at him through his phone screen that late night, had smiled comfort, had missed him like that, had claimed that Ryan who hadn’t even come close to guessing Shane’s true nature could see him the most? Either way, Ryan would not have become so conscious of his view of Shane had it not been for that night and right then standing in front of this man, lost as he was, trying to describe to him any sort of context for his feelings when he couldn’t even remember.

“I thought about what it means to see you since that night,” Ryan told him then as they stood in their small space, looking at one another and he waited for any sort of recognition in Shane’s face; a sign for the right answer even while the burn in his lungs was becoming a thread pull of glancing flame. “And I think after all this time, I’ve only seen what you’ve shown me, but I always want to know more, even....” Was it too deep a promise to believe that with or without a demon, this man was it for him. Even if it meant being shattered and alone? “...even if it’s my fault we can’t be closer.”

His hand on the table by Ryan curled, edged into a fist as he bent toward him, looking at Ryan like he was hoping to find something different, an answer. “I don’t know what you’re doing to me, Ryan, but you’re the only thing that doesn’t feel like a lie these days.”

_“Do it now.”_

Ryan felt his stomach drop. He hadn’t felt Shane since this morning but the physical vessel was leaning into his space, taking shallow breaths, warm only in body as Ryan put his trembling hands up, thinking in some recess of pushing him away, warning him of the danger he was in right then. “Shane,” he began. He could feel the naked relief of saying his name, properly, meaning it the most right then. “Please don’t go.”

“ _No._ ”

He wasn’t sure whether it was he who said it himself or the volcanic breath inside him pleading for release or even the Shane towering over him, drawing close enough that Ryan’s defensive hands pressed against the cotton of his shirt, against the hammer of his chest through it. Only brown eyes and a delicate mouth.

He would later recall how he didn’t even make a single move to fight himself because Shane’s shirt was bunched in his hand already when Shane leaned up against him, bowed down low enough that his nose brushed over his right cheekbone before his lips crushed into Ryan’s. It was slow enough to seem like they were doing something faint and secret, maybe even chaste because Ryan heard his own voice come out of him, mournful and hopeful all at once. Shane’s hands grabbed his shoulders tight, imprisoned him still and Ryan realised he’d stopped his breath when Shane’s parted his lips, coaxed his open and kissed him even deeper.

“ _Breathe_.”

Just like the night before; the same taste of heat and open fires, smoke tight in his throat, Shane was in him and the Shane holding him against the table, enfolding him and kissing him hard enough to bruise drew back and whispered against his lower lip, wet and panicked. “What did you say?”

“ _Please don’t go._ ”

Ryan hadn’t exhaled since he’d grabbed Shane but his eyes were shut; wet at his cheeks. He thought of the word traced in oil, gleaming like a curse. _Ihidaya_. Why did it come this far, why hadn’t it been simple enough before when he thought that maybe one day they’d do this, that all of it, from the way Shane’s smile made him giddy and how he felt like despite all his own ambitions, he still wanted Shane wrapped up in all of it.

“ _Breathe_.”

Shane’s lips pressed his lower lip, opened against his until Ryan was trembling, scooping fingers into Shane’s hair, drowning in familiarity and feeling it--a stormy force in his mouth, and he yanked Shane closer, letting Shane hike him up against the table. Ryan’s head was swimming, a puerile arousal shooting up the veins of his arms and chest. This supposedly empty vessel was desperately trying to drink him in and Ryan wanted that, but he wouldn’t breathe; he was determined not to, but he also wasn’t going to let go.

“ _Please don’t leave me_ …”

He felt Shane make the words over his own parted lips, sharp teeth scraping the edge of his mouth, shaking and laughing a little helplessly as Ryan grit his teeth, shaking with the effort.

“ _Just breathe, Ryan. You’re the only one wicked enough to make me stay.._ ”

It was too late for him, for both of them. Shane had hands on his thighs, curved a single and comfortable hold like his palms would span the circumference of them. It was a startling parallel to the sensation of his demon’s claws tracing a killing line up the back of his thighs last night, bending them to his chest and holding him down, letting the soft shape of himself rut up against Ryan like a press of friction. He reached carefully, slowly like he was afraid of what he might feel with his fingertips as he dropped his hands from Shane’s hair down his spine. There.

Ridges, like spikes down his vertebrae.

Shocked, the air rushed out of him like a tremor, his whole body racked with a sob he’d swallowed the moment Shane left him two days ago and the lips teasing his, tongue glancing a testing taste into his mouth were hot with it. Ryan moaned like he couldn’t help it, feeling his body respond when Shane’s hold on him tightened, went rigid as the smoke thickened.

“Shane, please…”

He heard it first before he felt it. Shane growling, low and steady deep in his throat as Shane guided Ryan’s tongue into his mouth. The air around them was humid, blistering like steam through his teeth. He was there, had been all along and Ryan could feel it in the way Shane’s body thrummed with heat and clutched Ryan closer, pulling his legs open and around his hips, pressing his knees to his waist and dropping hands to the table, overcome while Ryan’s fingers slipped from Shane’s back to his neck.

“Oh, Ryan, Ryan, Ryan…”

And Shane breathed again and Ryan felt him there, a whispering strength, a power in the rock of his hips, practically begging Ryan to move with him. It entered him like a shock, riveting up his nerves and making him fall back on the table. His eyes opened and he was in some recess aware of the whispers Shane was kissing down his throat and a stark awareness of the fact that he wasn’t cold anymore, and stranger still, the awareness that he had missed a fundamental detail.

“Wait…” Ryan gasped.

Shane drew back instantly, eyes swimming with a renewed sheen, almost like melting black, pupils blown so wide he was a beast to Ryan right then.

The words kind of fell out of him plainly. “I was kissing a demon,” he said, eyes wide.

Shane in perfect Shane fashion quirked a brow. “Well, yeah…you were kissing a guy who you just possessed with said demon.”

Harmonics. His voice was heavy, still very Shane but the smoke was in his mouth, still settling behind a long pair of incisors, fading slowly now that Ryan was simply looking at him. Two of him. It was in like a fresh cut between the two, a shadow enfolding him and adjusting his features to fit the sheer size of him.

It dawned like an ice bath and Ryan sat up, clearheaded and a little bit outraged. “No. _No_ , you were a demon when I kissed you.”

Shane frowned. “Wait, what?” He seemed to still be coming to sorts, still pressed between Ryan’s legs, fingers splayed over Ryan’s knees in a hungry grip. Ryan took stock of the way his nail beds looked whiter than average and a bit thick. Everything on him was absolutely physically manifested and he was definitely demon now, but…

He thought back to the first touch of Shane’s vessel’s lips, They’d burned.

“Oh.”

“Ryan, what’s happening to you?”

Ryan reached up, touched a ginger contact to his own lips, still stinging. “Shane, I didn’t have to kill the other guy to get you like this. He was…”

It was a shot in the dark but Ryan gently pushed Shane back so he could slide off the table. Shane, now much stronger, but still trying to shake his new features, shut his eyes and massaged his jaw as his incisors, both bottom and top began to shrink. Ryan twisted to grab his absolute mess of papers. He read the highlighted passage, the translated subtext of instructions he’d so carelessly followed like he’d been building Ikea furniture. He remembered, reading the words and moving mechanically, distracted by Shane. Of course. Shane inviting him to his place and Ryan blushing to his roots and thinking just finish this and don’t look at him.

God.

**Isolate the demon in the circle ihidaya. Singularize the demon. Hold in your mind the demon. Repeat the words. Speak the name ihidaya. **

The damn incantation had no translation. It was just the words in Syriac, the word ihidaya etched in Aramaic in superscript and Ryan remembered uttering it. The presence of the word was strange,

“I think I understand what I did…” he said softly.

Shane came around him, old warm self, filling the basins of Ryan’s senses with his scent, full of smoke and fire. Ryan was engulfed in his own realisation and the bright elation of Shane being with him again, casually running a palm down the small of his back and holding him in a wide span of fingers. “What did you do?” Old mocking lilt in his tone, and Ryan was so wrecked for him, but it was background noise for now.

“You were on my mind the whole ritual, I spoke your name when I thought something had happened to you. I’ve watched the tape over and over and they whole thing was about you and I…”

Shane reached past him, pawed through a few pages, surveying the scripts and Ryan’s scrawling notes.

“Shane,” Ryan twisted to look right up at him, smiling and feeling like an idiot for not even feeling the slightest bit bad. “I failed the exorcism. I put a demon in the circle with me and split him in two.”

Shane’s gaze flickered up at him, Ryan’s favourite smile already creating itself on the right corner of his mouth. “You mean to tell me that I was mad at you for exorcising me when I should have been furious because you managed a complicated and nuanced act of sorcery and split my essence in two.”

Ryan was awash in a quiet moment of speculation, disbelief and awe at the sight of Shane’s eyes going a cool amber right in front of him, like seeing the last loving embers of a wildfire that could have destroyed his whole world, but hadn’t. “Yes? It’s why he--you were both mad at me, why he or you were so upset, but that’s not even the craziest part...”

Shane was breathing in his space as usual, but now more open about trying at casual touches to make Ryan shiver. “You sure that isn’t the craziest?”

Ryan let the papers, and all of it drop back to the table and he took two good handfuls of his demon’s shirt, yanked him close like he meant business and marvelled at the risen eyebrow delight in his best friend’s expression, full of life and familiarity and yes, danger, lots and lots of it. “I’m sure,” Ryan murmured, pulling Shane down in a fierce celebratory kiss, sucking in a soft happy breath when Shane groaned so hopefully. “The craziest thing is that I wanted both of you, all of you.”

 

 

It took some machinations thereafter. A few weird little hiccoughs that messing with sorcery could do to a guy. Burn marks sometimes where Shane kissed him; shortness of breath when Shane was gone for too long. Ryan was convinced he might have soul bonded with Shane, taken some part of him and let it mix with him; he also was concerned what that might mean in the long run.

It was complicated because for all Shane was as insufferable as ever, kept calling him ‘Dumbledore’ and scaring the living shit out of him on location because he still insisted that ghosts weren’t real, but loved to drop hints that something else was always hungry in the shadows for a ‘bad little witch like you,’--for all of that-- Ryan couldn’t get enough of him.

That was fine because Shane seemed to like so much that Ryan was in on his secret too, living in the world like it was brand new; one where a man could have been a god living in ancient forest fires, now needing the carbon of human blood, addicted even.

Ryan figured like anything he’d approached in the past, miraculous as this was, it would take some trial and error.

He knew this was the case the first time he was pushing Shane down in his pillows, after Shane had undressed Ryan and kissed his pleadings out of him. Shane had him by the hips and Ryan grasped his headboard, watched the scintillated awe of his demon biting his lip in open anticipation like he hadn’t been cracking jokes about Ryan’s new set of holy water bottles--two five gallon jugs--just a moment ago. Shane was being gentle, still not sure when Ryan could coax his claws out and leave him trembling with red welts and wanting more; he stretched his whole long body, pressing his the line of his cock against Ryan’s ass, waiting for Ryan to tell him he could have it. Ryan wanted to ride him and told him so.

“Gandalf the Grey is feeling ambitious today--”

Ryan choked out a laugh, doubling up a little, feeling the tremble of Shane’s answering laugh between his legs. “Don’t fucking call me that!”

He only thought of it when Shane rocked into him and Ryan flexed his thighs, taking Shane in and meeting the rise of his hips, spread, wet and delicious. Shane’s head fell back in the pillows, and he growled a full groan, rumbling and hot under Ryan; made him remember what it felt like to feel Shane touch him from the inside. Shane’s nails dug, gripping him tighter, exposing his neck. Ryan’s wet fingers slid down the bars of his headboard, and he bent low licking up Shane’s beautiful long neck as he sped up, pumping his hips to make Shane make that noise again. Shane opened his mouth for him and Ryan almost couldn’t resist running his tongue over a lengthening incisor, sharp enough to cut his edges.

He said it around Shane’s tongue, pronounced the way he’d heard it now a hundred times since he’d restarted research on it. “ _Ihidaya_ , Shane.”

Ryan smirked when Shane’s smile formed over his, his palms reaching back to grab him in handfuls, slam him harder down. “ _Oh_ ,” Shane whispered, breathless and damp from Ryan working him so hard. “Now you’ve gone and done it.”

Ryan closed his eyes, rocked in Shane’s rhythm, spread his legs even further and opened his mouth. He breathed Shane in, the soak of hot smoke flooded his lungs and he closed his lips on Shane’s, swallowing a long pull of him. He let him waft inside him, let out a thrilled moan when Shane’s physical form wound his hips up, bottomed out and Shane bled through his veins, shaking through his muscles and nerves..

He wasn’t afraid of losing Shane. Anyway, he was the only one wicked enough to make him stay.


End file.
